The blog formerly known as Meh

Orbis non sufficit

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

http://chilledfruit.blogspot.com#6516063619630564601

Zen-ness

I'm feeling very zen at the moment. Back in Australia, hanging out at my mums house. I was burning down a mountain, jumping off 3 metre high rocks, flying through the trees in heavy wind and snow not 48 hours ago, and now here I am chilling in the warm 20 degree breeze coming in the back door. Flying around the world puts things into perspective. We live on such a small and fragile planet; it's astonishing how many people seem to think it is invincible.
I watched a documentary on the Apollo missions on the flight over, it was narrated by the astronauts who took park in them. It mentioned that the 24 astronauts who survived those missions are the only people to have ever seen the horizon curve until it bent back on itself, becoming a lonely blue marble hanging in the vast emptyness of space. The astronauts spoke about how fragile it looked, hanging alone in the black. It was a powerful movie, I had tears in my eyes a few times which doesn't happen much. Seeing the footage of apollo 11 launching into space, the lander reaching the moon, Neil Armstrong stepping onto the alien world, it's powerful stuff. Especially if you can comprehend the enormity of the task, realising that these enormous rockets were pretty much designed with pen and paper. Lots of them exploded during testing.
Especially considering that, for all the technological, computational and mathematical advances we have made since then, it is still so hard that mankind has not sent anyone back to the moon since 1976.
Note, I just found something cool, check this out (maybe you've heard of it already and I'm just out of the loop)
Google Lunar X Prize
Wanna make $20,000,000?
Anyway, thats enough from me. Looking forward to seeing you all again!

Edit: An achievable halo?

// posted by Ben @ 4:07 PM

Comments:

aww, i was hanging out for a last post (get it?! :P ) from the states.

Happy to have you back in australia osama ben laden, did you have fun blowing up america and all of their infidels!!!

It really is mind boggling amazing stuff with sending people into space, im sure in years to come itll be the norm, but to get a rocket with people 43656766345675645 miles above the earth to another "planet" as such is quite a task.

One think i heard recently was that noone told buzz and neil etc that there was a very high chance of them being killed. lol. They thought it was as safe as could be but it was nowhere near it.

Also the computer power in nasa at the time rivalled the amount on power in my phone. They had fuck all to work with really, like you said, pen and paper.

That google thing is old, they just sent a man to the top of the planet in one of those oxygen powered jets, called x17 or x##. The guy opened a bag of M&Ms to prove he had lost gravity.

You werent crying because of the movie, you were crying because now youre back to the real world, frankston...

# posted by

Sean : 2/27/2008 7:36 PM

welcome back
by the sounds of it your arrival back in australia brought with it a epiphany of sorts and this realisation of the world and how it exsists today.
it may also interest you to note that NASA as it is has actually genuinly forgotten how to get back to the moon all the technology has advanced to the point that the majority learned then is no longer relevant and thus become useless, go figure that one out.~ i read that somewhere think time magazine.

now for something very relevant,
driving IQ's round frankston area have nose dived sharply many of us have had near misses the past few weeks so take care with that.

oh and you may noticed that the government has done for lack of a better word, FUCK ALL, everything is a stage and food, fuel, child care and interest rate prices are set to skyrocket
but on the brightside the abbo's got there apology and are now lining up to sue the government

i'm glad you are back

# posted by

tony : 2/27/2008 9:00 PM

Lol at all that above :p.
Buzz and Neil and all those guys knew what they were doing was the most dangerous thing attempted by humanity, in the documentary Buzz was talking about how in the beginning the saturn V rockets were exploding every other test launch. They certainly would have been remembering that when they strapped themselves in :p. Also there was the thing with Apollo 1 when the crew was killed coz there was a spark in the 100% oxygen environment they were using.
Also Buzz talked about when he was in space, he'd look out the window and think about how death was about an inch away, just on the other side of the glass windows.
The astronauts also helped design the spacecraft so I'd say they knew what they were getting themselves into :p.

# posted by

Ben : 2/28/2008 12:43 PM

Btw, I posted that from my OFFICE. It's pretty sweet, new though and lacking in basic amenities, such as a chair for me to sit in. Has a computer tho. I plan to stick whiteboards up in here.

# posted by

Ben : 2/28/2008 12:44 PM

Today the human race is a single twig on the tree of life, a single species on a single planet. Our condition can thus only be described as extremely fragile, endangered by forces of nature currently beyond our control, our own mistakes, and other branches of the wildly blossoming tree itself. Looked at this way, we can then pose the question of the future of humanity on Earth, in the solar system, and in the galaxy from the standpoint of both evolutionary biology and human nature. The conclusion is straightforward: Our choice is to grow, branch, spread and develop, or stagnate and die.

In other words, I'm moving to Mars before it's too late! LOL

# posted by

Shazzie : 2/28/2008 10:43 PM

Im not impressed with those X Prize competitions, while 20mil is a lot of money to you and me, its nothing to a corporation who gets a ship to the moon. Hell, its nothing to a company that launches a rocket successfully.

Take SpaceX for example (search on wikipedia for more info), 100 million was put into it to design a new rocket and successfully launch a payload. With that budget they could affoard only 2 early-launch failures.
Thats just to launch a new rocket design and its not even new new, its just a standard rocket.

Nasa is now going backwards. Their Constellation program aims to hit the moon and mars with a "new" design of ship - basically an old Apollo, now called Orion, on top of a new Ares I launcher rocket. Obviously its a new school Apollo design, with computers, different material etc, but its still the same design, single use launch rocket (Ares I), single use service module and single use crew module.

WHY ARE THESE DISPOSABLE!?

They should be making REUSEABLE space vehicles.

I know they dont have the funding but seriously, they've stopped trying.

What happened to the inspiration?

WHERE IS MY STARSHIP?!!!!

# posted by

Steve : 2/28/2008 11:29 PM

I'll see what I can do about anti-gravity and warp drive, then maybe we can get you a starship :p.
The X prize comps are a good thing in my opinion, I mean there are 10 teams officially registered for this private venture to the moon one. Privatisation of space is the only way forward in my opinion, as you say governments just don't get enough funding to do the important things anymore. If however we can develop enough technology to allow corporations to profit from space then they will certainly do so, and it will drive space technology and development like never before. There are huge amounts of minerals in the asteroid belts, and once we build a moon base or large space station then we will have a way to "cheaply" move raw materials through the solar system since we won't have to overcome the gravitational potential well of the earth every time we want to move something around in space. WAY less fuel needed. And it will be piss easy (comparably) to drop loads of raw materials down to earth from a space station or the moon once we have the appropriate infrastructure in space. There is huge potential profit here, just a massive initial investment required. There is even methane in the atmospheres of other planets we can mine for fuel. If we can control nuclear fusion we'll be sweet too; the moon has massive amounts of helium-3 we can extract, which can be used as fusion-fuel.

# posted by

Ben : 2/29/2008 12:20 PM

It's only a few years till the future from Back To The Future - where's my freakin' hoverboard?

# posted by

Jason : 3/02/2008 6:25 PM

We don't seem to try the risky things so much anymore. Sure, they're still trying things that are dangerous, but there's a lot of emphasis on keeping any risk to an absolute minimum and no additional funding to compensate.

The drive seems to be gone to go to the moon, and to do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Without all the cuts the space program has suffered there's no real reason we couldn't have reached Mars by now. Sure, there's not that much practical use in doing so at the current time beyond research and the development of the technologies involved (admitedly no small thing), but it's something that could definitely capture public imagination and get more popular support for these things. We (humanity, as a species, I don't much care who specifically) need to be trying the hard things, the dangerous things, and the expensive things. Our leaders need to be putting themselves out there and pushing for more of the improvements and efforts that will push things forward but may not in the short term lead to re-election.

# posted by

Jason : 3/02/2008 6:30 PM

Basically, OH&S blows :).

# posted by

Ben : 3/07/2008 12:36 PM

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

Current Status

Blog Links

Links

ARCHIVES